Beamforming merges multiple audio signals received from a microphone array to amplify a source at a particular azimuth. In other words, it allows amplifying certain desired sound sources in an environment and reducing/attenuating unwanted noise in the background areas to improve the output signal and audio quality for the listener.
Generally described, the process involves receiving the audio signals at each of the microphones in the array, extracting the waveform/frequency data from the received signals, determining the appropriate phase offsets per the extracted data, then amplifying or attenuating the data with respect to the phase offset values. In beamforming, the phase values account for the differences in time the soundwaves take to reach the specific microphones in the array, which can vary based on the distance and direction of the soundwaves along with the positioning of the microphones in the array. Under conventional beamforming methods, the resulting beamformed audio stream from the several merged audio streams is a monophonic output signal.